The present application generally relates to determining a bus arrival time at each bus stop of a plurality of bus stops. More particularly, the present application relates to predicting a bus arrival time based on prior travel times between bus stops and real-time data representing a current journey.
Predicting arrivals of buses and/or other transportation vehicles at bus stops or designated locations is important in making a public transporting system more appealing and more efficient for passengers. With accurate bus arrival predictions communicated or presented to passengers, the passengers can make informed decisions about how to travel.
Improving a public transporting system is critical for reducing congestions on urban roadways. Providing timely accurate predictions about bus arrivals at bus stops along bus routes is one important step to improve public transporting system. Current systems for predicting arrival times of buses at bus stops rely on GPS (Global Positioning System) location information of the buses. While those current systems represent improvements over prior systems that have no available information of predicting bus arrival times, predictions of the current systems are not accurate, e.g., buses arrive more than 5 min later from the predictions. What occurs then is that the passengers, having perceived the predictions to be inaccurate, can no longer rely on the predictions at all. Thus, in many cities, such current systems have been abandoned for this reason, i.e., inaccuracies.
There may be several reasons why the current systems predict inaccurately bus arrival times: 1. The current systems use algorithms that may need further improvements; 2. Input data to the current system is not rich enough to permit an accurate estimation of bus arrival times. For example, the current systems use GPS information of bus positioning only to obtain data of bus travel time on segments that the bus already traversed. The GPS information does not provide information on traffic in an upcoming route.